Reporter

Foster parents … Linda Elliott and Stephen Payne with the Norman Lindsay painting they will exhibit at Wagga Wagga for the next 12 months. Photo: Addison Hamilton

HER owners will remain a mystery but at least she finally has a home - the first of a series of homes, actually.

A two-year search for the owners of a mysterious Norman Lindsay artwork has ended with few answers but the voluptuous nude will have a new home for the next 12 months on the walls of the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.

Woman with Satyr was discovered gathering dust in the vaults of the Art Gallery of NSW in 2010, having been lent to the gallery by the police force in 1980.

With scant details about its origin and date and no record of how the police force came to possess it, or why it was in the gallery's basement, detectives set about solving the decades-long cold case.

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Along the way, much of the oil painting's colourful past came to light, yet police say they will never know its true owner.

It was taken to the Art Gallery of NSW in 1980 by an exhibit officer from the former Criminal Investigation Bureau who was responsible for securing all seized drugs, firearms and valuable property in a vault beneath an old hat factory in Surry Hills.

Peter Chilton, now 81 and living in Bellingen on the state's north coast, said he stored the painting with the heroin and cannabis as it struck him as being unusual and very valuable.

He believes it was seized as part of an eastern suburbs break-and-enter investigation led by the late and famous detective Herb Talarico, who was involved in the arrest of the infamous bank robber and prison escapeee Darcy Dugan.

Mr Chilton moved the painting to the gallery to protect it from a tobacco beetle infestation but it was then forgotten about for 30 years.

Detective Tim Axtens spoke to relatives of the late Albert Jewell, a Vaucluse art collector whose name was inscribed on the back of the painting, but it is believed he sold the painting before he died in 1963.

Unable to track down any other owners, police have decided to lend the artwork to NSW galleries for 12-month stints.

Stephen Payne, the manager of the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, was delighted to receive the unusual gift earlier this week.

''It's a beautiful Lindsay, almost a classic,'' he said. ''We wish we could keep it for a bit longer but it's a wonderful thing that it's being shared around.''